A New Zealand-founded data intelligence start-up that expanded to San Francisco and landed clients including Uber, Dominos and Booking.com has raised $US10 million ($13.9 million) from two leading Silicon Valley venture capital funds and Australian fund Rampersand.

PredictHQ describes itself as a real world events platform that aggregates, cleanses, enriches and ranks real world events into one single "global source of truth". Its service helps its clients to create intelligent services that react to different events that could impact them.

The $10 million capital raising was led by Silicon Valley based Aspect Ventures and was also supported by well-known US early stage investment fund Lightspeed Ventures.

PredictHQ co-founder and chief executive Campbell Brown said he had used the company's seed round to open up its US operations as it would have slowed down growth to remain in New Zealand.

Hooking Uber

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He said that Uber had approached PredictHQ and was now using its product to understand what events would impact demand for rides. Uber hopes its app can notify drivers days in advance of where and when demand is likely to be and ensure it has more drivers online, in the right locations, at the right time.

"The new capital will be used to scale our teams across NZ and the US with our first office in Europe coming soon," Mr Brown said.

"We need to take the amazing foundations the team and I have built and amplify it with new talent, features, data enrichment and value creation for our customers. It's the most exciting time for a young business like ours and I'm sure there will never be enough hours in the day, so we simply need to remain focused on our mission."

Mr Brown co-founded PredictHQ with Robert Kern when the pair were working for a global travel group.

Hatching idea

They specialised in cruises, car rentals and other bookings that would regularly be impacted by events they hadn't anticipated. This led them to bring together all the unstructured data around events, to improve planning.

"Every day we would see our demand being impacted around the world," Mr Brown said.

"The following weeks we could retrospectively see that the catalysts for these spikes were real-world events, like 24,000 people inbounding to San Diego for the annual meeting of American Society of Hematology or 70,000 fans going to the semi-final of the UEFA champions league in Munich, which just happened to be on at the same time as the Bavarian Easter school holidays, creating a perfect storm of demand.

"We knew there would be a huge competitive advantage for us if we could identify the catalysts for demand."

Big name backing

As part of the deal Aspect Ventures co-founder and former managing partner of Accel, Theresia Gouw, will join PredictHQ's board. Ms Gouw is known as the US's richest woman venture capitalist after she got in at the groundfloor at Facebook while with Accel.

She said Aspect Ventures had been impressed by PredictHQ's unique data platform and saw big opportunities for large-scale expansion.

"PredictHQ's technology platform has the potential to improve business operations in multiple large sectors, from travel to retail to finance," Ms Gouw said.

"Most data start-ups are data feed providers. The real value is in the data platform and being the system of record for key parts of a business. PredictHQ's real world event data platform serves as that system of record for their customers."

Rampersand managing partner Jim Cassidy said a lot had changed at PredictHQ since it took part in its 2016 seed funding round, but that he had been impressed to see how Mr Campbell had handled the transition from New Zealand to San Francisco with a young family in tow.

Mr Cassidy said the startup's understanding of the US VC landscape, combined with its impressive growth in a highly prized area of data intelligence, had led to the latest round being competitive from highly respected US funds.

"It was obvious from the first few minutes of meeting with Cam and his team that they were onto something special. They've grown almost unbelievably quickly," Mr Cassidy said.

"We haven't seen customer demand anything like what PredictHQ is dealing with every day, with interest from almost every industry.

"I think part of why it did so well was because it is a solution for data scientists and it's beloved by some of the best data scientists in some of the biggest companies across the US and Europe. This creates a lot of talk, and the US VCs are very good at listening to that talk."